BlackBerry Is Winning In Indonesia

BlackBerry Ltd BBRY's popularity in the North American market has certainly faded over the past few years, but the company is seeing success elsewhere— particularly in Indonesia.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Indonesian market continues to show loyalty toward BlackBerry and its BlackBerry Messenger service, known as BBM. In fact, BBM is the dominant instant messaging service in Indonesia with 55 million active users.

BBM outranks Messenger and WhatsApp in Indonesia, which boasts around 50 million active users for each app in the country, according to estimates from social media researchers.

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BlackBerry has been looking to take advantage of its dominant market position in the country and has launched new features for the Indonesian market, including in-app shops, mobile payments and advertising tools for local brands. The company's efforts resulted in more than 750,000 channels being created in the country.

A Look Ahead

Looking forward, BlackBerry plans to combine e-commerce, advertising and communication capabilities in Indonesia— similar to Tencent Holdings' WeChat's strategy in China.

"We have seen WeChat in China lead the way in creating an ecosystem around chat in China, Line has also achieved this in Japan and KakaoTalk in Korea," Matthew Talbot, senior vice president at BlackBerry in charge of BBM told The Wall Street Journal. "But none of these players have reached the scale in Indonesia that we have with BBM."

"I don't believe there is anyone today in Indonesia that can compete with the ecosystem we are developing, particularly when combined with the scale of our user base," Talbot added.